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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Get Lit! 2015: 17 years of literary appreciation

Dan Webster

Above: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. before his 2004 Get Lit! appearance. Note the cigarette.

Since its inception in 1998, Get Lit! — Spokane's annual literary festival, founded and annually hosted primarily by Eastern Washington University — has attracted an amazing array of talent. From Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to Salman Rushdie, Jane Smiley to Richard Russo. Too many, really, to comfortably list here.

But the celebration, which is what Get Lit! truly is, has never been about individual writers. It's been about the discipline of writing itself, an art that is practiced by everyone from best-selling authors such as Vonnegut, acclaimed Northwest writers such as Sherman Alexie and Jess Walter to students in area schools learning the difference between a comma and a semicolon.

That celebration will continue next week when the 17th-annual version of Get Lit! begins on Monday, April 20, with three different sessions. While the 2015 version of the festival doesn't feature the literary firepower of years past, attendees will have the opportunity to meet, greet and listen to such writers as Alexie, Walter and a number of other notable visiting writers. For a full schedule, click here.

A personal note: In 2004, before Vonnegut's Get Lit! performance at what is now the Bing Crosby Theater (then the Metropolitan Performing Arts Center), I met with the then-81-year-old writer backstage. As a Spokesman-Review staff writer, I had interviewed Vonnegut by phone the week before. And I jumped at the chance to meet him in person.

We met in a small room off the theater's balcony level. A small group of students stood nearby as Vonnegut pulled a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes from his suit coat pocket. "Ya think I can smoke here?" he asked. Feeling friskily familiar — I mean, really, was this Kurt Vonnegut asking me if he could smoke? — I said, "Hey, you're Kurt Vonnegut! You can smoke wherever you want."

And so he lit up. I snapped the photo above. And I got a memory of a lifetime.